I swallowed hard. He had me exactly where he wanted me, and he knew it. We both knew it. Fuck, even the moth on the stone wall knew it.
“Water mirror.” My voice came out steadier than I expected.
He smiled, and I wanted to punch the expression off his fucking handsome face. “How did you manage it?”
“I’d send my voice through the reflection in the water that connected me to Caer Gwyll. He’d receive it on his end.”
Arthur’s jaw moved slightly, as if he was processing. “You could do this from anywhere?”
“Anywhere with standing water. Though I only ever attempted it through the water mirror in my bedchamber, where it was private.”
“You’ll continue,” he said with a quick nod. “Same method. Same location. I don’t want Merlin to know anything is amiss. You’ll contact him, and you’ll say what I tell you to say. He’ll believe you’re still his.”
I glared at him. “And if he asks something you haven’t scripted?”
He shrugged. “Then you’ll improvise.” He paused and then smiled again. “The point is that you’ll continue doing exactly what you were doing. The only variable is who you’re now serving.”
My power moved even though I hadn’t touched it. It simply rose within me like a slow tide climbing my sternum. Mordred’s wards immediately tamped it down again, but the air between us felt charged anyway, the way it did before lightning found ground.
I had to brace myself with one hand against the wall because the rise of it was so sudden and so extreme. When I glanced up at Arthur, I could immediately tell he’d felt it too. His expression was blank, but his left hand had closed around the cell bar beside him, and his knuckles were pale.
Almost as if in response, every drop of moisture in the room strained toward him. The condensation on the ceiling gathered itself into something with direction, with want and need. My own blood felt loud in my ears, singing at a frequency I’d never heard before, like a second pulse underneath my own.
His pupils spread wide, dark flooding over light blue. And for one unguarded second, I sawitin him, saw the beast and how it was responding to me.
We both stepped away from each other at the same moment.
He released the bar as I pressed my spine flat against the wall as if the cold stone was sufficient armor. It wasn’t. Nothing would have been.
Neither of us spoke. Neither of us acknowledged what had just passed between us, even though something most definitely had. But I didn’t know what. Just that my magic, my blood, had reacted to him. And his beast had responded to it.
He slipped his arm through the bars and unlocked the cell door. The sound of the bolt scraping back from the outside was almost deafening. Arthur pushed the door open and stepped outside. Then he slammed it shut again and locked it.
He didn’t look at me again. He just started up the corridor to the main door that led into the dungeon. But at the threshold, his steps slowed by a single breath before he walked through it.
I stared at the empty doorway long after his footsteps faded.
-GUIN-
The dream came for me again that night.
It always started the same way.
The Hall of Lineages stretched endlessly in every direction, its vaulted ceiling lost somewhere in the dark above me. Torches burned green along the walls, throwing everything in a sickly jade light. The tombs of the long-dead Pendragon kings lined both sides in rows; they were great slabs of carved black stone with effigies of dead men stretched flat atop them.
Arthur was there just as he always was.
As with every other time I’d had this dream, Arthur fucked me on top of one of the tombs, and I didn’t fight him. I never did.Instead, I welcomed the feel of him inside me, welcomed the way his body burned above me.
Then the dead kings began to move.
Bony fingers scraped the edges of tomb lids as jaws unhinged, some falling off. The skeletons sat upright in their stone beds, their faces turning toward us in unison like flowers tracking sunlight.
Arthur released my wrists, then Excalibur appeared beside him.
I never saw the last part coming even though I’d dreamed it a dozen times. He slammed the blade into my chest with the focus of a man completing a ritual obligation. I felt the heat of pain blooming outward as my blood channeled into rivulets, each leading to one of the dead kings. And they absorbed my blood as they always did, all of them breathing for the first time in centuries.
The last thing I always saw was Arthur’s face looking down at me. Not regretful. Not glad. Just certain.
